Questions before I submit patches...

[Benjamin Reed]

In porting KDE to MacOS X, we've exercised a lot of weird issues
surrounding the interaction between libtool and apple's linker.
I'd like to submit patches, but before I can, some of the hacks
we've had to add need to be genericised for proper submission.

One of the big issues is the flat/two-level namespace issue in
more recent versions of Darwin (1.3, coincides with MacOS X 10.1)
and higher.  As an aside, if you want more on what two-level
namespaces are, see:

   
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/DeveloperTools/ProjectBuilder/ProjectBuilder.help/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Linker/Using_Two_L__Namespaces.html

(that should be one line... sorry if it wraps)

Many unix applications have nasty issues when two-level
namespaces are in effect.  However, if something *can* be built
with two-level namespaces enabled, it would be preferable.  The
current default in libtool is to force everything to a flat
namespace.  It would seem the best thing to do is to have an
option to allow you to decide which behavior to use at build time,
so that software that is twolevel-compliant can enable it, and
older software that doesn't understand that can still be used
without changes with a newer libtool.

This would mean adding an os-specific flag to a script that
99.9% of the time won't even be run on OSX, which kind of
sucks, so I'm hoping you guys would have a better suggestion for
an alternative.  What is the best way to go about doing this and
still be a nice neighbor?  =)

TIA,

Benjamin Reed
address@hidden